Many in the past may have seen the majority of jobs in East Anglia as being farm related. As East Anglia has a heritage of being the grain resource for Britain in past years this view is understandable. Subsequently farm hands through the centuries have moved to the region in search of work. Today however recruitment in East Anglia is trying to change its image. Granted there are farm jobs available in East Anglia, both in pastoral and arable farming. Norfolk turkeys, despite the recent fall in trade due to bird flu still provide many families with Christmas dinner. This however is changing. The regions of East Anglia are now trying to show recruitment in a more modern light.

Recruitment agencies in East Anglia recruit in a variety of sectors. Jobs within the automotive industry, IT industry and training are prevalent in the region. As with many modern recruitment agencies, the focus has shifted from providing professionals with job opportunities to providing the service sector with a steady pool of workers. This can be seen as a general trend in the modern world, there has been a clear move away from secondary employment, such as production and manufacturing. Recruitment has now directed itself towards tertiary or service industry roles such as teaching and personal development.

Modern consumerism can be seen as ever increasing. The recruitment demands of shops, telesales companies and the hospitality trade are vast. This is no less true in East Anglia where the people of the region have embraced the modern consumer world as readily as other parts of the country. The centres of towns have become Meccas to capitalism, the shops no longer are individually owned but more and more are chain stores, and sadly this has removed some of the personality of the quaint town centres of East Anglia. A benefit to this however is that recruitment has become a far more wholesale affair; the modern chain stores now recruit through central offices on a new larger scale, through recruitment agencies and through the national press. Gone are the days of the slip of paper in a shop window advertising a job, this is now the age of the recruitment drive.

This is why when looking for a job it is often best to find recruitment agencies, as most contemporary companies will recruit using such services.

The internet has changed the face of recruitment immeasurably. Before the job market was reliant upon newspapers and shop windows, now most companies of any size have their own website and carry out recruitment through this medium. Regional recruitment is also a popular business as the need to provide people with jobs within their local area, or within regions such East Anglia is great. Naturally people like to work close to home and despite the efforts of national recruitment websites to present regional jobs; dedicated sites providing a local service are infinitely more useful when trying to find a job near your home.

It is clear that modern recruitment in East Anglia has changed greatly since farmers collected workers from the local pub and carted them off to the fields. Today recruitment agencies use all mediums available to them; newspapers, the internet and databases of potential applicants. Recruitment has become big business as many are more inclined now to sub-contract the task of finding workers to others. This is a common trend that shows once again why tertiary industries are doing so well in the modern world and why recruitment agencies are at its forefront.